1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates to peripheral devices in the computer field and the transmission control technology for computers, and in particular, to a computer docking station and a switching method thereof.
2. Description of Prior Art
Currently, a computer docking station has become a very important peripheral device of a computer system, in particular, a portable computer system. As shown in FIG. 1, a docking station 12 is connected to a portable computer 11 through a Universal Serial Bus (USB) cable, or through a Wireless USB (WUSB), or by means of other interface cables or wireless protocols (e.g. Ultra wideband general radio platform (WiNet) etc.), and thus may extend all Input/Output (I/O) ports of the computer, i.e. peripheral device interfaces such as serial port, parallel port, Ethernet port, video interface, microphone/speaker interface. FIG. 1 shows a display 13 connected through a video interface of the docking station 12, and a camera 14 and a speaker 15 connected through a camera interface and a speaker interface of the docking station 12 respectively.
As a new technology, existing docking stations mainly comprise several types as follows.
1) Docking Station with Wired USB Interface
Such kind of docking station is connected to a computer by means of a general USB interface. All Ethernet, VGA/DVI and audio signals extended from the computer must be packetized into USB data packets and then transmitted to the docking station, which in turn converts the USB data packets into data for different kinds of interfaces.
2) Docking Station with Wireless Interface Such as Ultra Wideband (UWB)
Such kind of docking station is connected to a computer through wireless UWB manner to implement the conversion of UWB data packets into data packets for different kinds of interfaces.
The inventor found the following disadvantages of the prior art in implementing the present invention. The first type of docking station described above has no wireless extension function, and thus lacks a flexible mobility; whereas, the second type of docking station only has a wireless extension function, and thus cannot be supported and used by a computer without the UWB capability. It can be seen that existing docking stations can not support both the wireless and wired connections, resulting in limited applications.